Bookmarks as IA

I once did a project for a client that involved talking with users about their browser bookmarks. The project was a redesign of an intranet that was built like a Wild West town, with a wacky combination of independent little plots stitched together only by virtue of being under the same corporate umbrella and having links on the central page of the intranet. Every department had its own navigation and design. It turned out that employees coped by using bookmarks to provide dependable paths back to the information they had so painstakingly located. Nothing new in that, of course; Web users still use that strategy. But interestingly, the names they gave to the bookmarked pages in the bookmarks were indicative of their own quirky needs. In effect, the bookmarks were individualized navigation schemes, or IAs. By studying the bookmarks, we got a pretty fair idea of users' mental models for information.

Whenever users create informational structures, it's worth studying them to discover what's core, and what's transitory. That's the problem with today's tag or link clouds: they can't distinguish between fad and eternity. Any given cloud today may have "Britney" as its biggest member, but that probably won't be the case next year. Clouds are intrinsically time-bounded. But it would be interesting to do some multivariate work like cluster analysis on several clouds over time to see what drops out and what stays.